Congressmen Who Took Money From The RIAA Send Chiding Letters To Universities

“If we do not receive acceptable answers, Congress will be forced to act,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee after sending a chiding letter and “survey” to 20 U.S. universities thought to have the “greatest amount of online piracy.”

Brian Rust spokesperson for UW’s Division of Information Technology, agreed to participate in the study. From the UW Badger:

“We’re glad that they’re asking us before action, but I don’t think we are as irresponsible as their press release and letter implies,” Rust said. “UW-Madison and all of our peer institutions have gone to great lengths to notify people, warn people and post notices via e-mail.”

Rust questioned whether the committee completely understands the complexity of sharing prevention without intruding on the educational initiatives that use similar technologies.

“There are many legitimate uses of file sharing,” Rust said. “If we prevented anyone from sharing music files, what would happen to music appreciation classes that involve downloaded legitimate files? They’d be pretty unhappy, and we’d hear about it.”

Howard Berman (D-Calif.), a co-signer of the letter told Variety: “By answering the survey, universities will be required to examine how they address piracy on their campuses.”

Even though Berman is from California, he received $22,700 from 23 individuals living in New York. People like: BMI/Executive Robert L. Ahrold, BMI/Sr. Vice President Marvin L. Berenson, Homemaker Clarissa A. Bronfman (she was good for $4,200!), , Edgar M. Bronfman (another $4,200!), and Robert A. Iger, the CEO of Disney.

Sorry it that was boring. Here’s an excerpt of the letter from Variety:

The letter noted that while five House hearings into the problem have revealed “modest progress” by some campus administrations, they have also yielded “substantial evidence to question the commitment of some institutions to adopt and, more importantly, implement policies that will actually contribute to a reduced incidence of campus digital piracy. The fact that copyright piracy is not unique to college and university campuses is not an excuse for higher education officials to fail to take reasonable steps to eliminate such activity nor to appropriately sanction such conduct when discovered.”

Survey questions include the following:

* “Does your institution have an ‘acceptable use’ policy that includes an unambiguous prohibition against illegal peer-to-peer file trafficking of copyrighted works through the use of campus computer and networking systems?”

* “Please describe, in detail, your institution’s formal policy or procedure for processing and responding to notices of infringement received.”

* “Beginning with the 2002-03 academic year and for each school year thereafter, please identify the number of student violations of your institution’s acceptable use policies that involved illegal downloading, uploading, or file trafficking of copyrighted material. Please also note the number of works whose copyrights were infringed.”

Reps for the motion picture and music recording industries welcomed announcement of the letters and surveys that went to Columbia, Pennsylvania, Boston U., UCLA, Purdue, Vanderbilt, Duke, Rochester Institute of Technology, U. of Massachusetts at Boston, Michigan, Ohio U., U. of Nebraska at Lincoln, Tennessee, South Carolina, U. of Massachusetts at Amherst, Michigan State, Howard, N.C. State and U. of Wisconsin at Madison.

Meanwhile, the RIAA has sent out the next batch of “settlement letters” to universities. There are some new ones on their list. 402 letters were sent to: Brandeis, Duke, Iowa State, Northern Illinois, Syracuse, and Tufts Universities; the Universities of Georgia, Iowa, Southern California, South Florida, and Tennessee; the University of Texas at Austin; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

dear agent… err… representative smith,
please feel free to fuck yourself and the greedy douchebags you are representing. i’d like to offer a few points of advice if i may:
a) get rid of the hair piece. you’re bald, that’s ok, and nothing to be ashamed of.
b) if you’re gonna be in bed with big business, choose a better partner. these guys are the crystal meth fiends of big business and that makes you guilty by association.
c) don’t you have something more important to work on, like steroids in baseball?

@yahonza: hear hear. Neither side of the aisle has a monopoly on greed and corruption.

Furthermore, it was Clinton who signed into law the DMCA made by a republican congress. Apparently, the one thing that both republicans and democrats can agree on is that the proletariat have too much freedom.

WOW! Is that all is takes to buy off a congressman? Shit, we can all piece up right now and buy him!

Oh, wait, that’s right…the “donation” are just a down payment. His friends and family get jobs with the industry for his servitude…and he will get a really posh job when/if he gets thrown out of office.

Dear Prospective College Student, the RIAA has done you the service of researching which colleges and universities have top-notch networks. Please consider one of the following schools: Brandeis, Duke, Iowa State, Northern Illinois, Syracuse, and Tufts Universities; the Universities of Georgia, Iowa, Southern California, South Florida, and Tennessee; the University of Texas at Austin; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I’m a board member of USC Free Culture and had the privledge of taking a seminar with Cory Doctorow, a visiting Fulbright professor @ USC’s Public Diplomacy program and advisor to USC FC. Believe it or not, we had success politicizing the undergrads; Cory’s been amazing and one of our goals next year is a public action against Berman.

Because US colleges are such quiet and well-ordered places, the House of Representatives have decided they might as well send nineteen of them a long, rambling questionnaire to find out what they’re doing about filesharing.Curiously, the US government tried one of these last year, but many schools…

I’m not from the U.S (I’m in Australia) but I read a lot about what is going on there via boing boing and various news papers, etc. Also I am going to be there in August. Woop!

The best thing about American Law is your wonderful Cival Liberties, unfortunately it seems that each year your’ governments (both Republican & Democrat) seem to chip away at these laws until there will eventually be none left.

It seems to me that your country’s laws have been going steadily down the Toilet since about Nixon (although I don’t know too much about your politics in the later 70’s and 80’s). Unfortunately Australia’s Prime Minister’s head is so far up George Bush’s arse that our Country has steadily been heading through the same pipes to eventually wind up in corporate crap land.